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Political Behavior

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08-01-2022 | Original Paper

The Incumbency Advantage in Judicial Elections: Evidence from Partisan Trial Court Elections in Six U.S. States

Authors: Michael P. Olson, Andrew R. Stone

Published in: Political Behavior | Issue 4/2023

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Abstract

Political scientists and legal scholars debate the value of judicial elections, including the degree to which elections effectively hold incumbent judges accountable. In this paper, we provide a causally identified estimate of the incumbency advantage in judicial elections. We assemble an original dataset of over 5300 partisan, single-member trial court elections from six U.S. states. Employing a regression discontinuity design, we demonstrate that incumbents enjoy electoral advantages of more than twenty percentage points due solely to being an incumbent. In contrast to research from other electoral settings, we find that these advantages are due largely to a scare-off effect, where even a narrow victory dramatically decreases the probability that an incumbent party will be challenged in the next election. Our findings highlight the sizable electoral returns to holding judicial office, reveal how the nature of the incumbency advantage varies across electoral settings, and provide compelling evidence of the challenges to holding trial court judges accountable through elections.

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The National Center for State Courts reports that over 99.5% of case filings in the American states in 2016 were at the trial court level: https://perma.cc/VY8L-PX33.

As Lee (2001, pp. 4–6) describes, speaking about the U.S. House: “[I]ncumbent candidates... enjoy a high electoral success rate... The casual observer is tempted to take [this] as evidence that there is an electoral advantage to incumbency... But winning candidates prevailed over their opposition for various reasons. Perhaps they are more charismatic, or they had more campaign resources... Establishing whether or not the differences in electoral outcomes between incumbents and non-incumbents represent a true causal effect or a simple artifact of selection is important first step to assessing the empirical relevance of theories that adopt a principal-agent approach to modeling politician-voter interactions”.

For example, roughly 37% of state legislators have a graduate degree, including the 15% with law degrees (Zoch 2020). Additionally, as many state legislatures only meet part time, legislators in these states face a relatively low opportunity cost to holding office.

Importantly, however, this disparity in opportunity costs may be reduced if the types of lawyers that select into running for judicial office have different career goals or face lower opportunity costs than the broader pool of attorneys. Indeed, Williams (2008) shows that women view the judiciary as providing greater opportunities for advancement than legal practice, which may help explain why women exhibit greater ambition for judicial as opposed to legislative office.

For many courts, especially high courts, multiple seats are elected at one time, complicating an RD analysis of incumbency. As we focus on trial courts, we do not include data from elections in Michigan or Ohio, nonpartisan election states that have a hybrid system for electing their high court judges that contains aspects of partisan systems (Nelson et al. 2013).

We formally test this claim below. One benefit of looking at multiple states is that we can generalize across states with a variety of levels of two-party competition. As Dumas (2011) finds evidence that judges in Alabama strategically switch parties in response to changing electoral alignments in their constituencies, drawing upon a variety of states helps guard against this behavior systematically shaping our findings.

We focus throughout the paper on the two-party vote share. We omit any race in which third-party, independent, or write-in candidates received more than 15% of the vote.

A particular concern is that incumbents may be strategic in their decision to run (or not run) for reelection. In our sample, 76.2% of all races feature an incumbent. Descriptively, there is little indication that those who won by narrow margins are less likely to seek reelection (see Fig. B.1 in the Online Appendix).

While this “local randomization” assumption is sufficient for causal identification in the regression-discontinuity framework, it is actually a stronger assumption than is required (de la Cuesta and Imai 2016).

In particular, the regression discontinuity design compares a Democratic incumbent to the counterfactual of a Republican incumbent—not “no incumbent” as a traditional regression model might—so the estimates produced represent the effect of a different change in incumbency status than those models. Additionally, the estimator focuses only on whether a party is the incumbent party, and ignores whether a given judge actually chooses to stand for reelection.

We implement the design using the RDestimate function from the rdd package in R.

Nevertheless, de la Cuesta and Imai (2016) illustrate how the regression discontinuity design may still be valid in the case of the U.S. House. In particular, the authors show that the evidence for the violation of this assumption is dependent on model selection and weakens when correcting for multiple testing.

We use a triangular kernel, which weights data closer to the threshold more highly than that further away.

We also present estimates at the “optimal bandwidth” using the bias-corrected point estimate and robust inference suggested by Calonico et al. (2020) in Table B.2. The estimate using this procedure is 0.258.

Hall et al. (2015) perform a similar test.

As with our main result, in the Online Appendix we present placebo tests using lagged outcomes for this analysis (see Fig. A.4).

If we limit our sample to contested elections—and thus make the exceedingly strong assumption that elections are contested without regard to the incumbent’s strength—we find that our estimated incumbency advantage all but disappears (see Fig. B.2 in the Online Appendix).

These results are presented in Table B.2, Fig. B.3, Fig. B.4, and Table B.3, respectively.

In particular, these results show that our findings are consistent across states with different levels of two-party competition.

See Fig. B.5.

We rely on last names for an initial match, and then when possible we check full names to avoid false matches.

The regression discontinuity estimates are for the comparison between a Democratic incumbent and a Republican incumbent; the panel models compare an incumbent to a reference category of no incumbent.

We also use this personal incumbency advantage design in order to compare the incumbency advantage for elected versus appointed incumbents. The results, presented in Table B.5, indicate that while being an appointed incumbent does not completely attenuate the incumbency advantage, it does diminish it between five and ten percentage points, consistent with existing scholarship (e.g., Bonneau 2005; Streb and Frederick 2009).

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Title: The Incumbency Advantage in Judicial Elections: Evidence from Partisan Trial Court Elections in Six U.S. States
Authors: Michael P. Olson
Andrew R. Stone
Publication date: 08-01-2022
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Political Behavior / Issue 4/2023
Print ISSN: 0190-9320
Electronic ISSN: 1573-6687
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09764-0

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